This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.